Green Party of the United States

2104 Campaign Support Fund Questionnaire

Candidate Name: Howie Hawkins and Brian Jones

Office Sought: Governor and Lt. Governor 

District, Municipality and/or State: New York State 

Campaign Email Address: [email protected]

Campaign Website: www.howiehawkins.org

Number of candidates in race: 6 or 7 tickets 

How many people are seeking this office? 6 or 7 for each office

Number of seats available: 1 Governor, 1 Lt. Governor

Number of incumbents running: 1 Governor

Contribution limits that apply?

$60,800 state legal limit; self-imposed $5,000 limit (the federal limit) for political committees like GP-US and $2,600 (the federal limit) for individuals)

What are your qualifications for this office? Describe how you decided to run for the office you are seeking. Describe your major accomplishments as a Green, and how they relate to the office you are seeking.

Howie Hawkins for Governor and Brian Jones for Lt. Governor are a ticket: one vote for the Gov/Lt. Gov ticket, like the federal Pres./VP ticket.

Hawkins, 61, has been an organizer since the late 1960s for peace, justice, labor, environment, and independent working class politics. He is a working Teamster seeking to enter a government dominated by paid-for representatives of plutocrats. He is running because the Green Party of New York State ran him in 2010, he won a Green ballot line, he finished third out of seven candidates, and the Greens asked him to run again in 2014. He has organized for the Green Party since attending first national meeting in St. Paul MN in Aug. 1984. He has made 20 runs for city, county, state, and federal office since 1993. His vote has grown from 3% to 48% in city council races.

Jones, 41, taught in public schools in Harlem, East Harlem, and Brooklyn for 9 years and is now a Ph.D. candidate in urban education and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is also an actor who has narrated films and audio books, often performs Howard Zinn's solo play Marx in Soho, and frequently appears in the NY Times and on Democracy Now! and MSNBC as a commentator on education policy. He has been a Green since the 2000 Nader/LaDuke campaign.

Winning a Green ballot line by receiving at least 50,000 votes for Governor will make it easier for our local, state, and congressional candidates get on the ballot as well as our 2016 Green Party presidential nominee.

What are the goals of this campaign? How does the campaign plan to achieve them? What are the chances of you being elected?

1. Minimum Goal: 50,000 votes for an automatic Green ballot line statewide until the next gubernatorial election in 2018.

2. Higher Goal within our reach: 450,000 votes and 10% for the best statewide progressive third party result in NY history, which will make the media and public treat the Green Party as a major third party, the voice of the left in New York State.

3. Define the debate and change New York's political dynamic. Greens moved the debate on gay marriage and banning fracking in recent elections. A third place finish this time for us means not just among the candidates but among the ballot lines. There will be 12 ballot lines with the Democratic and Republican candidates running on 4 each. Last time we finished 6th among ballot lines. This time we want to be right behind the Republicans and Democrats, listed third on the ballot (if not better). With that kind of result, the media and the public will look to the Green Party as the left, not the liberal Democrats or their second ballot line, the Working Families Party. That will change New York politics.

4. Build the Green Party. Building the local county-based organizations of the state Green Party is a central goal. We want to come out stronger and much better organized than we went in.

What are the major issues in the race? On what issues is the campaign centered? What strategies will the campaign use to get your message out?

We are campaigning for A Green New Deal for New York featuring economic human rights -- a job, a living wage, a good education, affordable housing and transit, health care -- plus clean energy.

We want to ban tracking and build 100% clean energy by 2030, which would be a full employment as well as a climate action program.

We want to end the test-punish-and-privatize education agenda and restore local parent/teacher control of education with full funding from the state.

We want to end corporate welfare, restore progressive taxation, and provide state revenue sharing to pay for unfunded mandates on local governments so we can cut our highest-in-the-nation property taxes and fully fund our schools and municipal services.

We want to legalize marijuana, end the war on drugs, and free drug war prisoners.

We want to desegregate New York's housing and schools, which are the most segregated in the nation, by enforcing anti-discrimination and fair housing laws and through new public housing in the cities and the suburbs that is humanly scaled, scattered site, mixed income and ethnicity, and clean energy positive and carbon negative. It will be a jobs program, an affordable housing program, and an energy program as well as a desegregation program.

There is much more in our platform at www.howiehawkins.org/platform.

What is the fundraising goal of the campaign? How much progress has been made towards that goal? How would the campaign use funds donated by the Green Party of the US?

Note: we anticipate giving $500-1000 each to 5 campaigns.

Total goal is $250,000.

$75,000 has been raised as of Sept. 1.

The campaign budget is supporting 5 field staff, a media coordinator, and a fundraiser, paying for literature and campaign materials, and campaign ads on TV, radio, and social media.

Is the campaign willing to share its donor list with GPUS? In return, GPUS will share donors in your district.

Yes

Has your campaign been endorsed by the local and/or State Green Party?

Yes

Prior to receiving funding, we will need confirmation from the party of the endorsement.

Yes

Opportunity & Diversity

The Green Party is committed to helping those who have traditionally been excluded from electoral politics the chance to run for office. Please indicate if any of the following apply to your candidacy: Person of color, Woman, Young Green, LGBTQ, Disability, Low-income, Other:

Howie Hawkins for Governor is a low-income worker, about $20,000 a year working part-time as a Teamster freight unloader at UPS.

Brian Jones for Lt. Governor is African American.

Additional Information

Please tell us anything else about yourself and/or your campaign you feel we need to know. This is a good place to include links to media about your campaign.

Any donation is for both of us as a ticket.

We have had hundreds of media stories: see www.howiehawkins.org/in_the_media.